Poppy Mom

Hometown Yarn, Hot Rods and Psychotherapy, LLC

It turns out, you can buy some pretty decent yarn at an auto body repair shop. Who knew?

I went in search of yarn yesterday and was afraid I’d have to resort to *gasp* Wal-Mart, since there’s not much else in my hometown. But I did a little digging and found mention of a yarn shop not far from my parents’ house.

“Oh, yeah. That’s new.” My mom said. “It’s in the same building as an auto body shop, I think.”

I found the location and sure enough, cars everywhere. I remember taking my old 1980 Mustang with the crap carburetor to the mechanic across the street many times. There were two signs on the metal building – one for the yarn shop and one for the auto body shop.

I opened the door and was greeted with the fumes of car paint. Blinded by the bright afternoon sun, all I saw inside was a guy with a blow torch, attacking some sheet metal. I quickly shut the door, tucked my Nursery Knits book under my arm, and started around the corner to see if I could find the mystery entrance to the yarn shop.

“Can I help you?” Blow Torch Guy yelled after me.

“Uh …. Yarn shop? Is there one? Here?”

“Yeah! C’mon in!”

Sure enough, once I got inside, I saw a few shelves in a corner, stocked with maybe fifty varieties of yarn and a few books. A huge loom, full of royal purple fiber stood next to a cherry red Chevy Bel-Air. Next to a primered hot rod sat a woman, surrounded by artwork on the walls and knitting works in progress.

Not only had I walked into the Twilight Zone, I’d also walked into the place where XX and XY chromosomes collade and beat the living snot out of traditional gender roles. It’s an interesting place to be, really.

I wound up buying four skeins of gorgeous imported cotton in bright orange and a shade of red identical to the Bel-Air, a pattern for a shopping bag, some circular needles and a set of bamboo needles I need for another project, which were about $2 less than I would have paid in St. Louis.

As I expected, the two business owners are a couple. They’ve only been together for a year, and she moved to my hometown from Kansas City seven months ago. She’s an award-winning fiber artist who was more than willing to whip out the scrapbook with newspaper clippings and photos of her past glories.

She’s also pretty lonely, being new to a town where everyone’s family has known everyone else’s family for about two hundred years.

Now, I don’t know what it is about me. Maybe everyone is like this, I don’t know. But for whatever reason, it seems like I can get people to disclose their entire life stories, even the really ugly parts, without really trying.

I once had a cashier tell me the sordid details of her divorce in the time it took to ring up my eight items or less.

Maybe I just have a friendly face. Or maybe it’s because I’m not shy and I’ll talk to anyone. I don’t know. All I know is I was at the yarn shop/auto body shop for two hours, and only about fifteen minutes of that time was spent on anything knitting-related.

The owner showed me her scrapbook. She told me about her first marriage to a controlling firefighter who dictated everything she ate, wore, who she saw and where she went. She mentioned her childhood abuse.

She talked about the nervous breakdown she had that led to her divorce. The years of eating disorders and depression. Her bi-polar disorder.

That struck a nerve. A great big nerve.

A little background: I haven’t talked to one of my oldest friends in two years. Two years next week, as a matter of fact. We had been friends since second grade. Through our adult life I’ve watched her struggle with a severe bi-polar disorder that has completely debilated her. It finally got to the point where I had to cut her out of my life unless she got the proper treatment and did the things she needed to do to get well.

When I first walked into the shop, the owner told me that I looked just like an old friend of hers that she hadn’t seen in years. “If you had blue eyes, you could be her twin,” she told me several times during our visit.

When she mentioned her manic-depression, I told her a little about my friend, and how I had ended our friendship.

“I think that’s what happened with my friend, the one who looks like you,” she said. The tears barely balanced on her eyelashes. “I think she just got sick of dealing with it.”

I was just about as uncomfortable as a patron of a yarn shop/auto body shop can possibly be.

“You know,” I hesitated, “When I ended our friendship, it wasn’t just because I was sick of it. I felt like I done had all I could do. And I felt like I was doing more harm than good. She was counting on me to make things better. And I tried to make things all better. But I can’t.” I caught my breath as she watched.

“She had to learn how to take care of herself,” she said.

“Yeah. She wasn’t learning how to do that, when I was always there to pick up the pieces and tell her she’d be okay. I had to leave so that she could learn to do that.”

“I never looked at it that way,” she said. “I never thought it could be anything other than something’s wrong with me.”

“Chances are,” I said, “It has more to do with your friend’s own shortcomings, and her own feelings of being unable to help, and the uselessness that brings. Her absence probably has more to do with herself than it does with you. I know that’s what happened in my case.”

“I never thought of that,” she said.

Maybe it’s the paint fumes talking, but I hadn’t thought of that until just then, either.

Posted by Robin at March 11, 2005 12:38 PM | TrackBack